Quite provocative topic, but that was question which came in my mind when I wanted to try out new non relational databases like CouchDB or MongoDB. I will warn you: this post will contain some whining ;)
I don’t know was it the architecture or what but I had lot of problems when I was trying to install those databases. I have been using OS X 10.4 for over three years and most of the time all programs was compiling fine. If building failed it was mostly because of some missing libraries.
Recently I upgraded to OS X 10.6 which is first 64 bit OS X. With Snow leopard I haven’t even compiled anything by myself but using Macports. Whit this setup even one PHP upgrade has failed, but that was easy to fix. I run port clean php5 and tried after that again and everything went fine.
More problems I have had with databases. I got CouchDB installed but it won’t start, only giving some weird error without anything informative to me. What came to MongoDB, it failed on dependencies. MongoDB port has dependency on C++ library called boost. First install attempt took forever and after 24 hours I cancelled the build. Third and fourth attempts failed after 20 minutes only with some cryptic error. What is most weird it worked on fourth attempt. Still I did everything same way every time.
When I got boost installed I started installing MongoDB from Macports. It took quite many failed attempts mostly because of some segfaults before it finally got through.
I’m not a C or C++ developer so maybe that is why those errors were so cryptic. I only want to use those products without understanding deeply its internal. So far 64 bit world has been really confusing for me.
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